Jim Brosnan, big league pitcher and author, dies

Remembering legends, celebrities and other newsmakers who passed away this year.

Bob Goldsborough, Special to the Tribune

Bespectacled and frequently hunched over a portable typewriter with pipe in his mouth during downtime on the road, Jim Brosnan, who pitched for the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox during a nine-year Major League Baseball career, was known by his teammates as "The Professor."

While he pitched in a World Series and helped the Cincinnati Reds win the National League pennant in 1961 with a 10-4 record and 16 saves, Mr. Brosnan found greater fame as an author, writing two significant baseball books and hundreds of magazine articles, book reviews, essays, instructional books and biographies.

Mr. Brosnan's first book, "The Long Season," was a diary of his 1959 season. But it quickly came to be seen in its day as nothing less than revolutionary, offering fans the kind of behind-the-scenes look at day-to-day life for players that had previously been off-limits.

"It was full of eye-opening stuff about big league ballplayers," said former Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist John Schulian. "He was really a pioneer. It took him a lot of guts to write that, and he wrote every word himself."

Mr. Brosnan, 84, died of complications from an infection Saturday, June 28, at Rainbow Hospice in Park Ridge, said his son, Timothy. Mr. Brosnan, a resident of Morton Grove for more than 50 years, had suffered a stroke in early June, his son said.

Born James Patrick Brosnan in Cincinnati, Mr. Brosnan in high school envisioned pursuing a medical career, he told Tribune sports columnist David Condon in 1963. He later studied at Xavier University in Cincinnati for one year but never earned a college degree.

At 17, Mr. Brosnan was drafted by the Cubs, and he toiled in the team's minor league system for several seasons with mixed effectiveness. In the offseason he worked for an advertising agency, first as an apprentice copywriter. He spent two years in the Army and while stationed at Fort Meade in Maryland met his future wife, Anne. They married in 1952.

Mr. Brosnan returned to baseball and was promoted to the major leagues with the Cubs in 1954. He returned to the minors the following year, racking up 17 wins and an impressive 2.38 earned run average with the Cubs' AAA Los Angeles affiliate.

In 1956, Mr. Brosnan returned to the big leagues for good, working mostly as a relief pitcher. The Cubs traded him to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1958, and the Cardinals then traded him to Cincinnati the following year, which was the campaign that formed the subject of "The Long Season," which came out in 1960.

Mr. Brosnan had started keeping a journal of his baseball experiences several years earlier, after a chat with Sports Illustrated's Robert Boyle.

"After I was traded to the Cardinals, his magazine took a look at the journal and printed some of it," Brosnan told Condon. He subsequently won a contract to write "The Long Season.

The book — an unvarnished look at players, managers and owners — became an instant classic for fans of the game. "The guys I played ball with in high school who had also read the book, we would borrow lines from it," Schulian said.

Not everyone in baseball liked the book. Broadcaster and former player Joe Garagiola famously called Mr. Brosnan a "kooky beatnik." And writing in the Tribune in July 1960, then-White Sox president Bill Veeck acknowledged that the book was "delightful" but that "Brosnan has his say about many who may have, in times past, had their say about him. This just doesn't seem to come off so well, and tends to lessen the impact and enjoyment of his undeniably colorful material."

Still, the impact of "The Long Season" on baseball writing was also undeniable. Many critics have concluded that Mr. Brosnan's book paved the way for an even more revelatory inside-baseball book published a decade later, Jim Bouton's "Ball Four."

Mr. Brosnan subsequently wrote "Pennant Race," based on the Reds' 1961 season. Published in 1962, it also earned critical and commercial acclaim.

In 1963, Cincinnati traded Mr. Brosnan to the White Sox. The team tried to impose restrictions on his writing, and he chose to walk away from the game, his son said.

"It was a different time. He said, 'I'm not going to sign that, and he didn't get a contract,'" his son said. "He did decide to write full time."

Mr. Brosnan worked for several years as a sports anchor for what now is WLS-Ch. 7 and delivered sportscasts for WFYR-FM. He wrote for a broad range of publications, including Sport, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Esquire and the Chicago Tribune Magazine.

Mr. Brosnan's subjects extended far beyond baseball. In a December 1966 article in the Tribune magazine titled "Lo, the Impudent Bird!" Mr. Brosnan provided a first-person account about his resistance to hunting, a sport enjoyed by many of his friends.

Mr. Brosnan also wrote books for boys, including "Little League to Big League," "Great Baseball Pitchers" and "Great Rookies of the Major Leagues."

Mr. Brosnan also is survived by two daughters, Jamie Kruidenier and Kimberlee Brosnan-Myers; four grandchildren; and a brother, Michael.

His wife died in 2013.

A visitation is set for 1 to 4 p.m. July 20, followed by a memorial service, at Simkins Funeral Home, 6251 Dempster St., Morton Grove.